


Annex 3: Confessions

by Legume_Shadow



Series: Echoes: A Peacemaker Kurogane/Rurouni Kenshin Crossover [14]
Category: Peacemaker Kurogane
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Author Loves Writing the Meiji Revolution, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-12-28 06:39:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legume_Shadow/pseuds/Legume_Shadow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A calm before the storm, and one last look at the daily lives of certain Shinsengumi members before the start of the Boshin War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Annex 3: Confessions

**Author's Note:**

> First Publishing: February 2013. All copyrights apply to the appropriate parties and no profit is being made from this fanwork.

**Annex 3: Confession**

_Year: December 17_ _th_ _-18_ _th_ _, 1867_

 

_Four nights after the Aburakoji Affair…_

 

First snow for the region started to fall not long after the sun passed the midday and didn’t stop even after the sun went down. The patrols still continued as planned, but the streets had become scarce with people as most stayed indoors and warmed themselves by their cooking or sleeping area hearths. By nightfall, there was no one on the streets save the occasional field mouse searching for scraps. The stacked woodpile that had grown nearly ten fold since the snow had started to fall was already half-way picked clean by the compound’s inhabitants.

“Okay…its too cold out there!” the slightly rowdy group heard Tatsunosuke say as he quickly entered the room and closed the partition before all the heat could escape. “But I think I got enough wood to last us a few more hours.”

“Come join us, Tatsu-nii!” Tetsu slurred a bit drunkenly as he held up his sake cup and took another sip from it. “You’re missing all the fun.”

Susumu could not help but smirk slightly to himself as Tatsunosuke gave his brother a very disapproving look before dumping the logs to the side and re-arranged the hearth in the middle of the room to accommodate the new logs he was stacking. There was a sense of euphoria floating through him as he quietly stared at the flames licking their way up the new source and the drunken giggling from both Tetsu and Kai added to his sense of happiness.

“Oh, so then,” Kai began, slurring his words slightly as he took another sip out of his own sake cup, “when I finally climbed up that damn hill to the outer gates of the castle ruins, I see the moron hanging out of the guard tower's window by the rope belt he had on. The guy was still hanging on to the damn lantern too!”

Susumu heard Tetsu explode in laughter and laughed to himself as he saw Tatsunosuke bury his face into a palm, shaking his head slightly before lifting the palm away and took a sip of his tea. _The guy needs to loosen up a bit_...

“You seriously worked with some strange people up in Sendai, Kai-nii,” Tetsu drunkenly said, “but that's not a story about you...that was about that moron...”

“Actually,” Kai said, refilling his cup and Tetsu's cup with more sake, “I got up to the guard tower and managed to pull the moron back into the tower, but in the process, my own pants ripped in half, right at the seam!”

This time, Susumu joined in the raucous laughter that filled the room. While Kai was by no means an unfit man, he was tall for the average height of a typical shinobi, and thus most of his clothes had to be custom-made. In Susumu's opinion, for ill-fitting pants to rip upon trying to just help someone up was hilarious. He also couldn't help but wonder if it was the sake that was causing him to be much warmer than it was in the room...

“What's even worse is that it was the commander of the guard who got stuck and I had to pull him out,” Kai continued to say, barely intelligible. “He even berated me for pulling him out of that situation and didn't even give me any extra money to go get a new set of clothes!”

“What a jerk.”

“Yeah, you said it, little man.”

“So Susumu,” Tetsu said, raising his cup a little higher as it sloshed a bit in his unsteady grip. “What about you? Any stories?”

His only answer to the request was a sip out of his own sake cup and a mischievous grin...

* * *

“May I come in?”

“Please do,” came the reply.

Aya opened the partition to the room and entered before closing the partition just as quickly as she had opened it to keep as much as the cold air from entering as possible. Her assumption as to why Souji still had the candle lit in his room was correct – he was reading. However, it looked as if the small in-ground hearth that was near him was starting to be extinguished. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but I couldn’t help but notice that your light was still on,” she said before holding up two logs that she had brought with her. “I thought you might like these if you’re going to stay up any longer.”

Souji smiled as he placed the book down and said, “Thank you. I had forgotten to gather my own supply before I decided to stay up.”

She brought the logs over to the hearth and started to arrange it when she saw Souji remove the blankets he was half-hidden under to keep himself warm and place the book he was reading to the side, before coming over to help her. “I should be doing that myself, Aya,” he protested as she removed her hands from the still-warm hearth with the now arranged logs.

“Relax,” she casually said, allowing herself to grin at his attempt to prevent her from doing one of the most routine and mundane things she normally did. It was only because of their friendship and the fact that no one else was around that she allowed herself to talk in that fashion to him. She blew a little on the dying embers and watched as several bursts of small flames fired up at the fresh air and eventually, the flames caught the new logs and started to burn them. She sat back as she felt the heat of the fire in the hearth suddenly engulf the room, warming it to a more comfortable temperature.

In the few moments of silence as the two of them sat back and watched the flames lick the logs, her eyes strayed to the book that her friend was reading and she smirked to herself. She wondered how many times Souji had read through the entirety of _Romance of the Three Kingdoms_ , but she knew that it could be a question for later. “I want to continue our conversation from a few months ago, Souji,” she said, her tone serious.

“You might want to come and sit here,” Souji suggested, inviting her to sit next to him, “I suspect that the answer you seek might be long, and your may get cold, since your back is towards the wind drafts that slip through the partition.”

She wordlessly agreed and picked herself off the tatami mat and gingerly sat next to her friend, afraid that he was going to shut her out as soon as he gave her an answer. “I heard that the physician that took care of you when we were in Edo was Matsumoto-sensei,” she said after a few minutes of silence. “Was he the one who told you that you had only a few months left?”

“Yes,” Souji said after a moment, staring almost vacantly at the burning logs.

“Do you know how you contracted it?” she hesitatingly asked.

“Are you sure you want to hear the answer, Aya?” he asked, turning his gaze to her. There seemed to be an infinite sadness behind those eyes, as if he were asking her to take back the question.

She briefly looked away before looking back and said, “I’ve lost almost every person that I cared about, Souji. Please allow me this one closure in my life.”

He sighed and looked away, settling his gaze back onto the fire as he said, “Your sister, Haruka-san, had tuberculosis, didn’t she? She was in the last stages of it when she volunteered to be killed by Shinomori-san, correct?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, feeling a pit of dread open up in her stomach.

“Rintarou-niisan allowed Tetsu-kun and I to watch the Oniwabanshuu succession exercise. Kashiwazaki-san told us that Haruka-san was suffering from a terminal disease. Four years ago, I was the first person other than your sister to respond to the assassination attempt on your former _Okashira_. I just happened to be there because I had been asked by Kondou-san to request shinobi to be assigned to the Roshigumi. When I got there, the assassin was dead, but neither your sister, your sister’s husband, nor your former _Okashira_ were conscious. There had been a strange scent in the air around your sister and her husband though, and in hindsight, I realized that both of them had breathed in most of the poison used, but I did not know that it had not fully dissipated just yet. I also ended up breathing in the remnants of the poison.”

The crackle of the burning logs filled the long, uncomfortable silence that fell around the two of them after that revelation. Finally, after a few minutes, Aya spoke up, saying, “When I learned that Haruka had the disease and that her husband had died two months before she told me, I also found out that the poison was imported from the west. In particular it was cultured from various plants that do not exist here and even if a trace of it had been drunk instead of inhaled, it kills almost instantly. I’m sorry, but there is no antidote.”

“I am at peace with the disease, Aya,” Souji quietly said after another few moments of silence filled only by the sputter of the burning logs. “If I may ask you a personal question?”

“You are more than welcome to, Souji. You’ve already earned that right a long time ago,” she answered.

“Assuming you and what is left of the Shinsengumi survive the next few months and one of the sides finally wins, will you keep serving the Oniwabanshuu in the same capacity as you do now?”

“Perhaps,” she said, leaning a bit back as she tucked her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “I never thought of any other thing to do. You?”

“Since my brother-in-law is head of the family, that had not left me much to do, but I had thought about running a dojo or something like that in Edo,” Souji wistfully said.

“You are a tough instructor, I’ll give you that,” she teased, grinning. “The new guys here always seem a bit afraid of you in their first few days with us.”

“Says the woman who wouldn’t even pull her punches when training her apprentice,” he retorted with an easy smile.

“It made Aoshi stronger and faster,” she defended herself as she released her knees and sat in seiza again. She glanced over at the book that her friend had been reading and asked, “How many times have you read the series?”

“Too many times,” Souji answered, picking up the book, but did not flip to the page he had been reading. “I would like you to have them when I am gone.”

Startled, she stared mutely at him as he held out the current volume he had been reading, his eyes serious. After a moment, she found her voice and said, “I…it’s not fair. It should have been me who responded to that incident before you did.” She carefully took the volume from him, though she refused to give into the sudden urge to cry. Her emotional barriers had never been this exposed since she started her assassination assignments at the age of fourteen, and it half-frightened her as to how deep the toll of the past months…no years of the nearly entire loss of her family and the knowledge that her one closest friend outside of the Oniwabanshuu she had was dying from a disease with no cure, impacted her.

“Thank you for the gift, Souji,” she whispered, “but I cannot take it just yet.”

“Then when the time comes, please take care of them,” he said, nodding and she placed the book back down. “I would also like to not talk about this particular subject anymore, please.”

“Then I will take my leave and let you rest, Souji,” she said, uncurling her legs from underneath her but was stopped with a slight pressure on her sleeve stopped her.

“Please stay for a bit longer. It is like you said a few months ago; we have not talked like this for a while. I have missed it,” her friend answered.

“So then,” she said in a more relaxed and lighter tone as she sat back down, “The last time I remember, you always had so many questions…do you have any now?”

“Hm,” Souji said, adopting a thinking pose as he looked towards the ceiling for a moment before looking back down with a smile and said, “Do you still write collections of random words?”

She shook her head slightly as she smiled and said, “I don’t. I gave it up about two months after I took Aoshi as my apprentice. He had mistaken them for code, so I burnt them before he tried to memorize it all.”

“Ah, pity,” he lightly said. “Tetsu-kun most likely would have loved to read the collection.”

“Well,” she said, giving him an equal look of whimsicality, “I heard from a certain someone that you stole the _fukuchou_ ’s haiku collection and had his poor page run around the Mibu village to escape being caught.”

“It was all good fun,” he evasively said though there was a mischievous smile on his face that told her that what had happened was pretty light-hearted. “I also swapped it out with a faked copy; using that trick you showed me back when we were younger. But eventually, I returned it.”

“Ah, child’s play,” she said, shaking her head slightly in exasperation.

“Yes, indeed,” Souji said, laughing a bit before settling down and said, “Your niece seems quite taken with Shinomori-san for a five-year-old.”

“She did always like to follow him around whenever the two of us were back in Edo between my assignments,” she said, with a touch of wistfulness in her voice. “Though I have to admit, it was partially my fault for tasking Aoshi to take care of Misao whenever we were there. He was already standing out like a sore thumb within our ranks, and it was an open secret that our former _Okashira_ had chosen him to be the one to lead us in the future, so I wanted to try to give him some sort of normalcy in what we did – some one to fight for. The Oniwabanshuu are not a bunch of heartless thugs who go around backstabbing people and spy for gold. We’re just like the rest of the people – ordinary and tasked to do things that most others won’t touch.”

“…I know,” he answered as she fell into silence.

“I apologize; I didn’t mean to say all that…”

“You are forgiven,” Souji said in a light hearted tone. “But you are correct, even in this den of demons, we are what we are, drawn and thrown together by the politics of the time. We have to all do what we have to do to survive the tide.”

The silence that fell about the two was amicable and lasted for only a few moments before Aya said, “I have a personal question for you, if you would permit me to ask.”

“We already know each other too well to keep standing on formality, Aya,” Souji pointed out. “Please ask.”

“Remember five years ago, at that time when we were just sitting under that huge sakura tree, watching my mom berate the trainees that day?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding with a slight smile on his face. “I distinctly remember your sister also saying that perhaps your mother was a bit too harsh on the trainees that day.”

“She probably was,” she said, shrugging slightly. “You told me that both your sister and brother-in-law were pressuring you to find a suitable wife and that you told them that you may have found someone. Is that true?”

The hesitation written all over his face caused her to suddenly feel guilty for asking such a personal question, but before she could stammer out an apology, he said, “Partially. We talked often, but she did not know and I never did write to her. Actually, come to think of it, I never worked up the courage to write to her. I also became caught up with the excitement of the Roshigumi being formed and our protective mission to Kyoto.”

“Did you look her up a few of months ago?” she quietly asked him, curiosity getting the better of her discretion. The current amicable atmosphere between the two of them reminded her of the halcyon days and she just wanted to enjoy it as much as possible before it disappeared back into the storm of rebellion and war.

He shook his head slightly in the negative before saying, “You know how children exchange items for fun, not knowing that it has a more significant meaning when they are older and much wiser?”

She nodded, remembering the silly and whimsical things she, Haruka, Ayumu, and even occasionally with Susumu and Souji, exchanged whenever they found something fascinating…which usually involved sharp or then-forbidden objects. The three of them – Haruka, Ayumu, and her – had gotten in a lot of trouble when they had been young kids just playing around with sharp objects.

“She had given me something small when we were children. It has become my bookmark for whenever I am reading,” he continued before picking up the book that he had given to her and flipped through the pages. “If you will forgive me, I want to take it out.”

She saw him flip to near the end of the book before opening it up and saw a very small, pressed sakura blossom that had an unusual coloring to it. The petals were a familiar light pink, but the color transition from the pink edging to the white center was marked by an unusually dark outline of red. She recognized the pressed blossom – she had seen it dozens of times before, always pressed in between books, but now she finally understood the meaning. As Souji fished the pressed flower out, she reacted to the startling revelation by placing her hand over his to prevent the flower from leaving the book. Discretion be damned, she wanted an answer.

“Why did you tell them, Souji?” she quietly asked. “You _know_ that shinobi cannot have lives above the statues that we’re born into. I didn’t even earn the right to present myself with my last name to anyone until I successfully completed my third assassination.”

“Yet you and I were friends since before I could even form coherent sentences,” he answered in an even tone, looking at her squarely in the eyes. “I did not tell them your name, and they could only speculate as to whom, since my brother-in-law’s commitment to keep our family’s friends and allies on good terms meant that I was sometimes sent to their residences to be the family ambassador.”

“Is _this_ true?” she asked, putting a slight pressure on his hand that was covering the pressed flower.

“It had been,” he said. “I do not know if it is anymore, because we are different than we used to be.”

“You kept it,” she pointed out, taking her hand back.

“That I did.”

She watched him close the book without taking out the petal and place it back down. Impulse overtook her and even though the rational portion of her mind was cautioning against the consequences that could possibly result in her actions, she threw caution to the wind. She leaned in and quickly embraced Souji, holding onto him and felt him stiffen a bit in surprise. “Thank you,” she said, “for the memories…for everything.”

Just as she was about to let go, she felt Souji relax a bit and return her embrace, saying, “You are welcome.”

* * *

_Four mornings after the Aburakoji Affair…_

 

A sudden blast of cold air woke him up from the warm, dreamless sleep that had wrapped around him. As he opened his eyes, he took a deep breath, feeling no pain in his chest – good; it was still a safe day for him. He almost could not believe his streak of luck for the past few days; each day and night that had passed, he had woken up with absolutely no pain in his chest and he was not coughing at all, despite the cold, dry weather. The sound of someone shuffling around in his room and arranging the woodpile near the sunken hearth caused him to turn his head slightly, though he already knew who it was, just by the sound and the presence he felt.

“Good morning, Souji.”

“Good morning, Aya,” he said, watching as she carefully arranged the wood on the dying embers and blew life back into the fire as she had last night.

She was already dressed quite warmly whereas he was not and thus still laid under his covers. As soon as the fire was sparking and licking away at the logs, he watched as she picked up a carefully folded bundle of clothing and set it gently down beside him. She leaned over and he felt a very brief pressure of her lips on his forehead before she drew away, giving him a smile and said, “You should get dressed.”

“Aya,” he said, reaching out from under the covers and grabbed her by the wrist to stop her from getting up. “As careful as we were, please understand that we cannot continue like this. I do not want you to contract it,” he stated.

“I know,” she quietly said, turning her hand over so that his hand was resting on her palm. He could feel the rough calluses on her palm from years of gripping the handle of blades. “I also agree,” she said after a few moments of silence. He withdrew his hand and slipped it back under the covers, but she did not move away. “Our nights and days shall be our own when we are not on duty,” she said, “but should you want to spend it with my company, even if it is just to talk, please just ask.”

“Then would you be willing to spend today walking like we used to in Edo, when we were younger and much more naive?” he asked, looking up at her.

“If only this naïve First Unit Captain would get up and get dressed,” she teased, smiling before getting up. “I’ll be waiting outside.”

 

Susumu could feel the pounding headache roar in his skull, threatening to send him back into the darkness of sleep that was elusive yet at his grasp, as he slowly opened his eyes. As the headache continued like the ancient drum beats of a warring army, he slowly turned his head to the side and saw that a merry fire was currently burning in the sunken hearth – he had thought that he had seen it go all the way down to embers before he had passed out from the alcohol intake.

He grunted a bit as he lifted himself up, surprise to see that he was actually lying on his futon with his covers over him, but when he pushed back the covers, he saw that he was still fully clothed. Someone from last night must’ve dragged him from wherever he had passed out and made sure that he was covered so that he wouldn’t freeze to death.

_The irony of dying while being a drunken shinobi would be hilarious_ , he sarcastically thought to himself as he got up, trying his best to ignore the headache before rooting around the small cabinet near where he slept for a certain small bag of herbs. If there was one good thing about being a medical doctor on the field, it was the access to all sorts of herbal medicines, including the one that helped in the alleviation of headaches.

He squinted as he stared at the small bag he pulled out, making sure that it was the right color and opened it to see if the contents inside were the right contents he was looking for. It was too dark for him to tell and he groaned while running a hand over his face. He was never going to get that drunk ever again…damn headache… He shuffled on slightly unsteady feet towards the entrance to his room, careful not to walk near the hearth, seeing that he was probably not coherent enough to actually put out a fire if he accidentally bumped into it.

_Dying while having a hangover and being lit on fire because of my incompetence would be absolutely hilarious_ , another sarcastic thought cross his mind as he opened the partition and the full force of a Kyoto-region winter hit him, temporarily clearing the fog that had settled in his mind.

_Dammit, its cold_ , he said, shivering a bit before stepping out and closing the partition. He didn’t bother to go back for an overcoat – at least the cold seeping into his body would keep him alert and awake enough to get to the kitchens to hopefully get some warm water so he could take the medicine.

“Make the sun go away, Tatsu-nii…” he faintly heard the complaints of Tetsu say as he slipped on his shoes and dragged himself through the snow, towards the kitchens.

Owlishly blinking, he saw Tetsu and his brother ahead of him and with a satisfied smirk, he was glad he was not the only one to feel horrible. Now if only the headache would go away, then he could enjoy the sight of his friend being as absolutely miserable as he also felt.

“Gods, I hope you brought enough medicine for all of us, Susumu,” he heard Kai say as he blearily saw that the big shinobi had dragged himself from his own room and was also trudging, like him, towards the kitchens.

“Nope,” he simply said, faintly grinning to himself at the hilarity of it.

 

~*~*~*~


End file.
